Where to find iron in Dune: Awakening

You'll need to head to a new region to gather this ore.

ThePawn.com June 9, 2025 2 min read

Grabbing some iron in Dune: Awakening is one of the necessary steps in upgrading your equipment and what you can build in your little desert enclave. You will have already crafted plenty using copper, but now it’s time for the Iron Age, though that will necessitate you relocating a little bit to actually find some.

Sadly, this does mean you’ll have to contend with heatstroke and hungry, hungry sandworms trying to chow down on you. All that said, here’s how to find iron in Dune: Awakening, plus how to craft the special cutteray you’ll need to harvest it.

Dune: Awakening iron location

Dune: Awakening iron - Using a Cutteray — Iron is easy to find in the Vermillius Gap, but you’ll need a Cutteray Mk1 to harvest it (Image credit: Funcom)

You can find iron in Eastern and Western Vermillius Gap; the two regions directly to the north of Hagga Basin South where you start. Before we talk about how to get there, you first need to research and fabricate the Cutteray Mk1, which is capable of mining iron. For this, you’ll need:

6x copper ingots
4x EMF Generators

Both of these are easy to get. You mine copper from boulders with blue spots using your cutteray and turn it into ingots in a small ore refinery in your base, while EMF Generators are usually located in moisture-sealed caves, i.e any of the cave icons on the map.

Once you’ve got your Cutteray Mk1, you’re ready to head north. The only problem is that to get to the regions with iron, you’ll have to cross a big sandy divide without getting eaten by sandworms or heatstroked. While you could probably make it travelling by night and moving just a little way at a time, your best bet is building a sandbike to speed across the desert, or getting a friend to give you a lift on theirs if they install an extra seat.

As soon as you cross, you’ll find the Southeast Ironworks and the Southwest Ironworks, plus a load of rocky pillared areas that have iron ore rocks dotted around them. Iron looks almost identical to copper; you’re searching for a big boulder with metallic spots all over it instead of blue ones. Once mined, you can turn iron ore into iron ingots at the small ore refinery as well, but unlike copper, this process also costs a fair amount of water, so you’ll want to stock up first.